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Kenneth Reitz writes "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment ... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."

>> Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution?

Umm nope. I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy. The words nice, Clean, and Microsoft just don't belong in the same sentence. And why sully a nice, clean Linux installation by letting anything from Microsoft come into contact with it? I'll stick with OpenOffice thanks.

Umm nope. I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy. The words nice, Clean, and Microsoft just don't belong in the same sentence. And why sully a nice, clean Linux installation by letting anything from Microsoft come into contact with it? I'll stick with OpenOffice thanks.

[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

When you add all the plugins/add-ons/integration with 3rd party software/sharepoint integration/how almost half of Office doesn't have an OOo equivalent at all, never mind feature for feature, and the fact that the percentage of employees in a company doing accounting (well, accounting firms aside...) is relatively low, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were wrong by an order of magnitude or two...

Most users don't use/need all the additional bloated crap packaged in Office. Most just require a good word processor and spreadsheet. Maybe a data base. OOo fits this bill very well.

Me, I'm a contractor, and OOo Writer is perfect for contract documents. Calc handles statements, invoices, payroll and calculation of payroll taxes, bidding calculations, and most anything else. So for most, which option is a wise choice? Cough up hundreds of $$$ for Office, or use OOo which comes standard with most all Linux d

It's not always a matter of a single user though. I know that our users use a TON of spreadsheets for example. Half of them don't know how to do much more than plug in numbers into the assigned spots, but they'll still use spreadsheets developed by someone else (we have someone in IT who does Office training who normally will develop spreadsheets for a user if they need help - usually for comparing values. Our Assessor uses a lot them to plot housing sales values in a given area for example in order to determine a proper per sq ft value for property there).

Now, I'm known as the "open source guy" at work. I do my best to promote it where possible, and trust me I get "the look" whenever I bring up an open source solution in a meeting. That said, another employee suggested that we might look at OOo as a way to cut costs a bit. Because of my aforementioned "open source guy" status, it got thrown in my lap to determine how well it would work.

Long story short, around a quarter or more of the spreadsheets that I opened simply didn't work correctly. Even some of the Word documents had some minor formatting errors. The database engine crashed on me quite a bit, and had no Access compatibility whatsoever (though we generally swat a user with a stick if we find them using Access for anything other than a frontend to a server side database). I'll give them credit and say that Impress (the PowerPoint clone) seemed to open everything I threw at it with VERY few glitches (some transitions didn't work right but that's very minor).

All in all though, I ended up recommending that we stick with Office. It just wasn't worth the hassle of determining whether a document would work, and if it didn't going through and correcting everything so that it DOES work.

Clearly you've never worked in a major organization. Posting internal spreadsheets attached to bug reports? Yeah, right. Unless you want to be out of a job, you have to run it through proper channels. By the time you're done doing the rounds with legal, who'll again have to ask someone in accounting what this really means you'll be weeks down the road. You might still get no, or demands that you sanitize it in a way that means you can't show the problem anyway. And even if you do there's good chance someone will bug you to reverify the bug is still there in some newer version while most closed source accept that when the bug is reproduced with them, your job is done.

It's a different thing if they were using OpenOffice. But his job is to evaluate it, not waste his and other employees' time developing some third party product they don't use and thus don't contribute to their business. Just opening up the document, conclusing "this doesn't look right at all" is about 100x faster than actually making up a useful bug report with a test case you don't need to run by legal or getting it past legal. Welcome to business realities 101, that's probably why they let a self-admitted open source fan evaluate OpenOffice vs MS Office in the first place. Honestly, I don't know of many companies that would.

Clearly you've never worked in a major organization. Posting internal spreadsheets attached to bug reports?

No. He can post the formula to a new spreadsheet with dummy data. You are right that I've never worked in a major organization but I handle confidential documentation often. That has never stopped me from filing a bug.

If the question is serious, then generally if there were no (or very few) sales in an area then we assume the value is the same as it was during the last reassessment (when there hopefully were sales) and then adjust that value for inflation.

If a citizen disagrees (these values are used for property tax assessments) then they can always come in and contest the value - if they can show good proof that the house is overvalued (nobody seems to come in if we undervalue anything . . .;)) then we'll adjust it do

"It might Cost X amount of dollars to switch documents to work with OpenOffice, but after that initial cost, there's no extra licensing cost in using OO, as any documents created in OO should work properly in OO."

This is true. And in many cases it's a good argument.

But think about an office that has spent 10 years creating custom spreadsheets with custom equations in them that just don't work in OO.o. The math just isn't there, nor are the graphing features. OK, so they could find different ways to do th

I believe it was 2.0 at the time. We haven't since revisited the idea, since after our initial decision we've purchased Office 2007 licenses for everyone so until there's a new version of Office to contemplate whether to upgrade to or not, I doubt we'll look at OOo again.

That's part of it too. OOo doesn't just have to beat the newest version of Office for us, but also needs to be worth moving not only new users but also all of our old users with valid Office licenses OFF of that product and to OOo (since

Also, if you do this, it's one big step towards your company switching to Linux, which would be an even greater cost cut.

Unfortunately that's not in the cards for the foreseeable future. We're running far too many niche applications with no Linux/OSS equivalent at the time being. I'm having a hard enough time as it is convincing them to keep running Linux on the SERVER side where we can. The web team (despite my advice, but it's not my area so all I can give is advice) recently just migrated from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS because they got a new coder who was all about ASP.NET (whereas most of our site had previously been

Not even gonna bother asking for a citation on that, because I just started work in a company that does financial software, and lock-in is a large part of (from what I can see) most such companies' business models.

For a lot of companies, Office is mandatory for them to function. Instead of hiring programmers to create good solutions, they have managers and analysts sitting around creating the next business-vital piece of shit package of Excel, Word and Access VB scripts to fill a role. Oh and don't even get me started on huge companies who put business critical data on shared drives as MS Access applications. Like it or not, these are the people who

How can you make yourself stupidly dependent on FEATURES not available in competing software? So people that need to make pie charts that can't swap to using NoPieChartingAvailableOfficeSuite have made themselves stupidly dependent on a feature not available in it?

Competing by features is the whole point that software competition is supposed to revolve around for christ's sake.

The most used programming language in the world is VBA in excel. Most of the worlds companies have millions of lines of business critical stuff in spreadsheets that would need porting to something else. That's simply not going to happen, even if it was a completely brain dead decision when it was first made.

IIRC there was a merger of two large insurance companies here in the UK a few years ago, and as soon as they tried to rationalise their systems they got stuck because the process relied on circa 30,000 e

[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

I strongly suspect that the number of people locked into Windows because of Quickbooks is a lot less than the number of people locked into Windows because of the fact that they share documents with other humans.

I'll probably be modded a troll for saying this but OO lacks a British English dictionary for the spell checker, so it's not much good to me. That one missing feature makes OO impossible to deploy at a lot of companies and all educational establishments here.

This isnt news, really. I snagged Crossover Office last year when it was free and installed Office 2007 so I wouldnt have to load a VM to use it. Unfortunately, as a student, a few of my assignments require 2007, and Id rather run it on my laptop than stick around school doing work.

Damn that sucks, I'd organise an appeal for the student body to have teachers adopt non-proprietary software. To be teaching proprietary software especially with things like this, a stupid office suite, and demanding it's use, is just all kinds of dumb, and I believe wrong for a college to do. And some people wonder why "student software" is so cheap, like a drug sample. No, students should have the freedom to choose which office software they want to use to complete an assignment.

The few times I saw the requirement for a.doc file I emailed the lecturer and told them that I didn't have Office, didn't have the money to buy it and since it wasn't on the free software repo that we were provided (which actually had quite a bit of expensive MS software), I couldn't use it. Most of the time they wrote back and told me I could hand in a PDF instead. It always worth asking individual lecturers for an alternative. Just be polite, don't do it as part of some geek crusade against Microsoft (ha

99% of the time however, taking the anti-Microsoft side happens to also be the intelligent/reasonable/correct side, and already comes with many reasons to back it up. Most people don't just hate Microsoft just because, they hate them for real reasons. But yeah, I got your point and agree. It's not just MS, it's Adobe and other pedlars of proprietary software that use tactics to try to push their software on students instead of being fair and using standards where possible.

I keep Windows software off of my Linux work environment in general, too. Unfortunately, my coworkers have a tendency to send me spreadsheets with more than 2^16 rows. This requires Office 2007. At least, it won't work on OOo 3 or Gnumeric.

That would be a very silly limitation for OOo to have, agreed, and one would think that would be an easy thing to fix, though that's definitely a big sheet...maybe someone should break things apart a little more.

It's not just the macros. I do IT support for a chemistry department at a large university, and OO.o just doesn't do the math, even at the undergrad level. If your assignment is to create a spreadsheet with all your results data, have it do some calculations, then draw a graph, you're pretty much stuck with MS Office. We tried OO.o in our lab -- it would have saved the department something like a grand -- and we had to put MS Office back on after a week, because no one could do their homework.

Can't do the math? I find that a bit hard to believe. It seems more likely that the students can't download solutions to their homework.

One thing I could believe is that OO doesn't produced proper scientific graphs. I wouldn't use either OO or MS Office for this these days, but this used to be true of MS Office as well. Perspective pie chart? No problem. Errors bars? What are those? If MS Office has subsequently acquired those features but OOo doesn't have them, then clearly MSO would be more usable

I have to agree, why bother?If I want to do something important I use LaTex, if not then OpenOffice works just fine.

As much as I hate Microsoft's operating system, their office suite is pretty decent. I happen to like the ribbon design, as a sometimes-user I have no intention of memorizing the menus. MS Office has terrific shortcut support as well, with hit-a-hinting like in Konqueror. I do have a problem with the proprietary document format, but I have heard that MSO 2007 SP-something or other supports ODF so that is not an issue anymore.

This Open Office extension lets the user save a document as a valid PDF file with the original ODT file embedded for editing. This is, in my opinion, the perfect document format: viewable in common software already installed on most desktop systems, and editable in an open source, cross-platform office suite. Furthermore, all the wonderful command-line PDF tools available for Linux work on these documents perfectly. The only thing missing from the extension is better save support, as the user currently must be careful to export (not save) as a Hybrid PDF file. For someone in the habit of hitting Ctrl-S after each sentence, this is quite a limitation.

There's a simple reason many people need MS Office: compatibility. When you submit an article to a scientific journal, or a federal grant application commitee, or to a literary journal, or a fiction magazine, or a publisher or any sort, they want it as an MS Word document with specific formatting. Yes, that's not in every field, but it's in enough of them. Maybe that will change someday, but for now, I have a couple hundred users who would quite likely be willing to switch to linux, if only we could get

Yup. And if the formatting of that MS Word file is complex enough, it won't be the same in both programs. THAT is the problem. For simple stuff, it's fine. For medium complexity stuff, it's almost always fine. Start throwing in complex equations and complicated formatting, and it starts breaking. Not a whole lot, but enough to make it incompatible for those uses.

You don't know anything about Openoffice, do you? It can open MS formats and save in them. Has done for years. I've set up a stack of disadvantaged students with Linux and OpenOffice and I have never had a complaint about OpenOffice. Ever.

I bought a used PowerBook from a friend a year or so ago, and it came with Office 2005 for Mac. I do most of my academic writing on that machine. My desktop machine at home is a Linux box, and I have OpenOffice on there.

I agree, it is trivial. Also I get a bit irritated thee days when people present a load of commands to type in. When in fact it is perfectly possible to do the install with the GUI these days. For seasoned linux users commands are quicker, but they are a real turn off for new users.

Welcome to one of my user pet-peeves. Every time a user doesn't know the difference between a slash and a backslash, I get a little more annoyed. Every third time, I have to say "the one with the question mark above it" when I say slash and "not the one with the question mark" when I say backslash.

We get to thank Microsoft for feeling the need to differentiate DOS from CP/M so many years ago. Why oh WHY did they have to do that?

For MSDOS 2 Microsoft made both slash and backslash work. This seems reasonable so that you could run old command-line programs and type something in that would get past their assumption that '/' started switches and should be parsed out.

This is all perfectly reasonable.

However after MSDOS 2 Microsoft went downhill fast, becoming exactly what everybody here hates. It would have been *TRIVIAL* to make all the new software prefer slash. But some arrogant asshole there realized that this would make it easier t

this is the one big thing that p's me off with Wine... things that work on one version break on later ones... I've given up trying to get things to work with it... I keep a dedicated windows box for those few apps & games I need/play.

That's not a troll. "All Linux" in the literal sense would mean nothing but Linux, so there's no Open Office either. I think the GP confused "all Linux" with "all open source" or more likely "no Microsoft".

How could Office 2007's benefits possibly outweigh its costs and complications? This time MS has moved even further to break backwards-compatibility with earlier versions of office, which means you will find it even more difficult to share files with people you know who have older versions of the same.

And with the quality of the free office suites that can read and write the files of the previous versions without needing windows compatibility on non-windows systems, why even bother running the newest MS Office?

I hate MS office 07 with a passion, since I'd got so used to using the older version. Switching between older MS office versions and OO was, and still is, much less painless. There is some stuff cool new stuff in there, but most people will never use it.

Having said that, you can download a utility (free, from MS) that enables users of older versions of Office to access the newer files. Not that you should have to, of course.

The even better solution is to install OO3 on your clients/friends computers, sin

For me, it's not about MSOffice. OOO is fine. Its about a mail client that works with Exchange, and Evolution isn't there yet.

I can't change my mail server, or its settings. I have no control over the mail server, or its gateways for that matter.

With the evolution-exchange package I can only connect via OWA, and thats horrible. Let's face it, even with IEx on a native Windows system, the Exchange OWA is horrible.

I don't think the wine tricks is the answer to my problem, but mail is really the last piece I need to fully convert (I run 2 desktops, 1 XP for mail, and 1 F10 for work.) to linux. Let me tell you when I have to capture text on one, and mail it... I really hate life. Same for the other way around.

I have access to a site licensed CD of MSO2K7, and although I wont be using it aside from testing to see how it works, it's not a long term solution for me (and many others I'd assume). Evolution needs to get better. I'll wait.

For me, it's not about MSOffice. OOO is fine. Its about a mail client that works with Exchange, and Evolution isn't there yet.

I can't change my mail server, or its settings. I have no control over the mail server, or its gateways for that matter.

I don't know anything about Exchange, but I gather it's a mail server of some sort, but the foreboding sense I get when people talk about using it suggests to me it's somehow more. In fact, if it was a mail server in the manner to which I'm familiar, you could obviously check your mail using something else, or forward it to another address.

Despite that easy conclusion, I'm still confused. How did Microsoft manage to produce an email server-client solution that's only compatible with itself. It seems like ma

Calling Exchange an email server is like calling EMACS a text editor.Exchange does calenders (including shared calenders and options so others can see your calender), meetings, appointments and more.

What I want to know is, what is the difficulty in producing an outlook replacement on linux that speaks all the proprietary stuff. If people can reverse engineer MSN messenger, Office Document formats and all sorts of other proprietary MS junk, why cant people figure out Exchange? Or is there more to it? (fear o

It's not a question of "speaking" the proprietary stuff, but also of interpreting it correctly and making sure the software acts on the data in a useful way. Calendaring is a difficult problem and not really interesting to the "typical OSS hacker".There's progress being made though, see http://www.openchange.org/ [openchange.org]

But the GP was unable to send email from the Linux box. I find it hard to believe that Exchange doesn't allow imap (and LDAP?) access, or at least SMTP. Then again, what do I know, I'm in a cushy university where I can always SSH into the UNIX server and send mail through pine if all else fails.

The open source does-it-all collaborative suite programs like Exchange certainly need to be more competitive, but so far they are promising. So, maybe your Exchange-using organization should switch. Two "larger" looking ones I've found are:

Usability, I guess. I'm not a frequent user of office-type tools, but when I use the new Office (excel or word), I find its handling of some things just a bit easier than in the older version of MS Office I normally use. When I go home and use OpenOffice, the differences in convenience are GLARING.

For example, deleting the contents of cells in OpenOffice Calc is significantly more annoying than in MS office (of any recent version). It sounds silly, but it's also really annoying, and if I had both on my system I'd be using Excel with no hesitation. If productivity is a concern, rather than merely cost, I feel like MS Office would win out. (I have no studies to cite, peer-reviewed of otherwise -- this is just my opinion.)

This time MS has moved even further to break backwards-compatibility with earlier versions of office, which means you will find it even more difficult to share files with people you know who have older versions of the same.

Not true at all. You can save to different compatible version of office if you want (although if you use features introduced in newer versions, obviously you're formatting might get messed up) + there's an official free PDF exporter plugin (if you don't want to use the printer).

And with the quality of the free office suites that can read and write the files of the previous versions without needing windows compatibility on non-windows systems, why even bother running the newest MS Office?

Because the new Office UI actually improves my productivity (from someone who did the cold-turkey switch having over 10 years experience using the old UI). Despite all the bitching from people who have never used it, and people just switching from the old UI, if you give it half a chance it makes things a lot easier (for instance using styles properly is now a sinch).

Because I want to use something better than the mess that is OO. For anything slightly more complicated, it feels like OO starts to fight you & it's got the feel of Office 2000 or earlier (lessons they learned from & fixed in 2003 & later), and I'm talking from a usability perspective (not whether or not it's pretty).

There's plenty of valid issues & critiques to be made about Microsoft & its products. Office is now a very stable, fast, reliable, & secure piece of software that beats the pants off of the competition. The only real issue remaining is the slight vendor lock-in using Office entails (since OO does support the formats fairly well).

Free software is great & I use it now almost exclusively (except for booting into Windows for proper tablet support when I need it), but you have to be realistic as well - why do you think Linux has been gaining some more mainstream momentum the past year? Because there was a conscious effort to clean-up the UI & make it more appealing. OO could learn a thing or two (and perhaps make the transition easier by including a Office-compatible shortcut mapping)

* Caveat - when I refer to the Office suite, I'm referring to Word, Excel, & PowerPoint (and OneNote but it doesn't have any competition with respect to pen support). The other pieces don't have as big a following (with the exception of Outlook - but I think Goggle's web software provides a far better experience).

have they resolved the whole 'the way your document looks when you print it is dependant on your printer drivers' thing? I know it was around in 2000 and pretty sure 2003, I know office isn't meant to be used for actual publishing or the like, however it's still something pretty major to be fixed.

Speaking as someone who reluctantly installed Office 2007 (Well, Office 2008, which is Office 2007 for Macs) recently I actually have to say I'm impressed with the way it treats compatibility with Office's older formats. If you save a file as an older document type like Office 97 or 2004 it runs compatibility checks on your content and everything to make sure you don't lose anything. I'd love to see that in OpenOffice, as opposed to the vaguely frightening dialog that basically tries to get you to save to ODF because that's the only format it's sure of.

Office 2008 is much better than 2007 for basic stuff. Only problem is that it doesn't support VBA macros at all. You have to use Applescript for macros, and they don't work in Windows versions of Office.

For that reason I still have Office 2004 for when I get files with macros.

I'm not sure about Office 2008. However, with Office 2007, you have to be careful with the "Compatibility" mode. Saving in a 2003 format, Office will still save all of the 2007 features. As long as it's opened 2007, everything will look fine. However, when you open it in 2003, things can look really bad.

The gotcha is that you have no clue what the document will look like unless you open it in 2003. 2007 hides the changes it needs to make in order to maintain compatibility.

There's the small issue with OO.o 3.0 doesn't allow more than 65,536 rows (It must store the row count in a uint16) in a spreadsheet, but excel '07 will allow that, so you can't use OO.o in that instance.

Yes, if you're using that big a spreadsheet, you ought to use a database instead, but that's beside the point when I need to open that spreadsheet.

The second hit that Google turns up for "oo 65536 rows" is http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/hacks/number_of_rows [openoffice.org], which shows you how to increase the limits for both rows and columns and tells you what breaks if you do. At least one person has increased the limits to 2 000 000 rows and 32 000 columns, resulting in a bottom-right cell address of AUHT2000000.

"Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."

The only reason I would want to run MS Office in linux is for MS OneNote. Believe it or not this is actually a great piece of software for students and there is no FOSS alternative that comes close. The closest competitor is Evernote which doesn't run natively on linux either.

Crossover has been doing this for a while now. I've been running Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 under it for work. I even purchased crossover myself to use at work because of their awesome licence policy basically saying: a. run the Software on any computer, so long as no more than one person per license is ever using the Software at any one time.

Otherwise, these guys provide a great service to the linux community with their work on wine, and their prices

I know you can run stuff under WINE or whatever, but usually my experience with Micro$oft's idiocy is that many of their update and add-on web pages and functions are intentionally crippled if you aren't running under a M$ Windows OS and MSIE browser.

Specifically you can't click more than about one link at the office.microsoft.com to look for 'free' updates, templates, converters, or whatever without getting hit in the face with an "Office Genuiue [dis]advantage" check that wants to use ActiveX crap in MSID

How do you know? I looked up Photoshop CS3 and learned that "CS3" is a version number. The company that makes Photoshop also has several other products with the same "CS3" version number. He could have also been talking about any of those. The original poster should have stated the actual product name to be clear.

I fail to see why Linux isn't ready for the desktop. The only problem I see is that we're in a OS multiverse, that has a parallel Windows and Linux universe, both with the same (read serious real world) functionalities, but not realy good traveling tunnels between them.

Ofcourse that's being worked on, but sadly only on one side; the Linux universe. The Windows universe just tries to fsck everything up.
So much for the balance of creating and destroying...

I do. I happen to communicate with people who use MS Office. By "use" I mean "type an email in Word and send it as an email attachment". I'm going to become rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

have you ever seen instructions that use a GUI? They are filled with screenshots of every menu and where to click. (and then the gui isnt consistent between versions of a product/os)
command line instructions only need a short few consise instructions.
open terminal-> enter this-> press enter
If anything using a gui is harder (Ive spent ages in windows previously looking for some sound options)